DECIPHERING THE INVISIBLE
Giancarlo Flati’s art never ceases to amaze. He is a master of the art of painting and has achieved some highly original results along his pathway of conscious artistic expression. His technical expertise has been forged in the fire of research and this has led him into the fascinating and somewhat mysterious world of scientific investigation. As a respected authority on human nature and its fundamental origins, he decided to devote himself to painting not only to transcribe the truth in the interstitial spaces of his genetic make-up, but above all as a visible projection of the invisible, or a reflection of the flow of life imprinted on the retina by a reasoning that calculates as infinitely as time and space in the universe.
Flati’s painting, which I came across and started following ten years ago, is highly intriguing and in some ways extraordinary. The tangle of molecular strands with which it is interpreted draws the observer towards indeterminate micro- and macroscopic spaces of a world that appears to be the product of imagination and the interpretative manifestation of a biological structure.
Complex geometry, biomorphism and other types of visible chemistry guide the hand of Giancarlo Flati as he thus ventures to find expression on the margins of art and science, and is almost an introduction to the figurative or verbal results of language.
The artist’s expressiveness does not attempt to superimpose the narrative inspiration of cosmetic and moral awareness on the exuberance confusion that one would almost wish to be free of the constraints of materiality at its intimate formative core. An artistic process such as this, as I wrote a few years ago, ends up as “a series of illustrations done methodically according to the rule of ‘orderly disorder,’ and establishes a kind of balance between antagonistic genetic forces by imitating the physical state of organic and inorganic systems.” In view of what Flati has produced over the years, I believe I have judged it correctly as a cycle of totally original aesthetic experiences within the washed-out, fashionable scope of contemporary taste.
Giancarlo Flati lives art as a moral imperative. In doing so he rediscovers the miraculous virtues of experimental and aesthetic research codified by life sciences. He thus goes against the philosophical and portending view of the rhythms of nature in order to make them ‘speak’ through a figuration that instantly predominates; ‘spying on life and its secrets’ is not to be achieved in the short term if this endoscopy of the infinitely minuscule is to become a paraphrase of the elemental, the cosmic and the synthetic encounter of space and time.
All the ‘visions’ that Flati has created have produced a magnificence of colour that eschews the easiest and most illusory fascinations; meaning and sentiment are its masters and appear imbued with clear-headed reasoning, with their figurative hypotheses that beg philosophical consideration. This premise gives rise to an artistic ‘frontier’ production that obliges the artist to put aside ego in favour of a figurative prolepsis or autopoiesis of the vital matter.
These are relationships that compel art, religion and science as one to enter into the Giancarlo Flati’s game of representation and to elicit a thoughtful and participatory aesthetic reaction. Herein lies an incontestable originality of work characterised not only by its view of things but also by its extraordinary spectacle, which invites observers to enter into the perceptive experience of ‘matter in motion’ with intellect and sentiment in equally intense measure.